Portfolio Sorting and Sizing

I was wondering if there’s any way to sort portfolio pages by a method other than date? By title or randomly, for example.

My portfolio is also a bit hotchpotch as the featured images are all different dimensions. This means the row heights are variable and the title text isn’t always visible on mouseover where the image is thin. Any suggestions to fix this (other than manually modifying all the featured images to be the same dimensions with white space) would be much appreciated.